Murray N. Rothbard, Business Ideologies in the Reform-Progressive Era, 1880–1914 (1977)

Murray N. Rothbard’s brief review of Alfred L. Thimm’s 1976 book judges its account of business ideology historically uninformed and conceptually unstable. The review moves from neglected scholarship to failures of evidence, then challenges Thimm’s favorable interpretation of Morgan-group corporatism. Its central distinction is between a scholar’s freedom to reject revisionist interpretations and the obligation to engage their research.

Rothbard situates Thimm outside two decades of debate, naming revisionists, organizational historians, and scholars of Hoover and associationism whose work the book overlooks. Yet chronological obsolescence is only his opening objection:

But there are more problems with this book, for it would scarcely have been acceptable even before the modern research explosion.

The omission of Sidney Fine’s earlier work reinforces this judgment. Rothbard attacks sweeping generalizations, a conversational style, and anachronistic comparisons, but his substantive concern is how Thimm establishes what counts as “business ideology.” Ignoring the National Civic Federation and the Committee for Economic Development while treating an allegedly uninfluential National Association of Manufacturers textbook as representative of postwar business opinion confuses the existence of a statement with its institutional reach.

The review’s interpretive center is Thimm’s celebration of the Morgan financial group’s departure from classical liberalism toward corporatist conservatism. Rothbard objects that this favorable account excludes the economic interests and effects of the transformation:

There is no acknowledgement of the cartellizing side of this movement, or of its economic consequences.

This criticism shifts attention from the supposed intellectual realism of business leaders to the market arrangements their program supported. Rothbard also rejects Thimm’s assertion of a wholesale business return to laissez-faire in the 1920s. His final conceptual objection concerns the relation between finance capitalism and managerial control:

But Thimm adds unique twists of his own; thus, the rise of finance capitalism somehow becomes the logical precursor of the alleged dominance of management over owners in the modern corporation—even though Morgan et al. were certainly the embodiment of large-scale ownership of stocks and bonds, and were the antithesis of the alleged dominance of non-owning managers.

Here Rothbard insists that concentrated ownership cannot simply be made the precursor of its supposed displacement without explanation. Closing with a complaint about misspelled names, the review remains sharply evaluative rather than developing an alternative history. Its relevance lies in the standards it demands of business-ideology scholarship: engagement with historical debate, evidence of institutional influence, attention to cartelization, and a clear distinction between ownership and managerial power.